Kate Bush, Donald Sutherland, and weird science combined beautifully in the
film for her song Cloudbusting. Is this the perfect music video? asks
Bernadette McNulty

Like most people excited about going to seeKate Bush in concert next month I will have never seen her play live before. Concert footage of her only performance run, 1979’s Tour of Life, a recording of which was released as Live at Hammersmith Odeon, was one of the four videos we possessed when my father reluctantly acquired a machine in the late Eighties, and the VHS tape, although it actually belonged to my brother, became nearly worn out with my obsessive viewing.

But I first fell under Bush’s spell in the autumn of 1985, the year she released her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love. The record had already gone straight to number one when on an October Saturday, mum took me on one of our cinema trips. Thefilm I think we went to see was Brewster’s Millions but I can recall nothing about it. All that has stayed with me is the vivid memory of the trailer that showed first, a premiere of Kate Bush’s new video for the second single from the album, Cloudbusting.

For nearly seven minutes I was mesmerised. There was Bush, dressed like a boy from the Fifties, with a short red Dennis the Menace wig, Fair Isle cardigan and dungarees struggling up a vertiginous hill, behind a giant machine pulled on ropes by her father, played by the Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland. There weren’t many hills that steep in Birmingham and I had never seen such a vast horizon as the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire where the action was set.

Into that seemingly endless blue sky, Bush and Sutherland pivot around the giant silver pipes of their machine. When nothing happens, Bush clutches Sutherland and she looks almost comically tiny, barely reaching his waist. The scene cuts to Sutherland in a laboratory and then back to sinister men in black hats and coats who appear and bundle Sutherland into the back of a car, chased by Bush. From the back window, he gestures her back to the hill where in the finale, she manages to wrestle the machine into producing a giant rain cloud, heavy drops falling down onto the car as it disappears over the horizon.

Despite her esoteric reputation, Bush had grown up as much obsessed by film and TV as novels or Pre-Raphaelite art. Her first single, 1978’s Wuthering Heights, was originally inspired not by reading the book but by watching the 1967 BBC adaptation of Bronte’s tortured romance, starring Ian McShane as Heathcliff.

Cloudbusting did begin as a book that Bush had read nearly a decade previously. A Book of Dreams was Peter Reich’s 1973 memoir of life with his father, the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, famous for his experiments trying to capture the energy of orgasms - orgone, as he called it - from the atmosphere to produce rain clouds. The Austrian émigré had been arrested by the American government at his home, Orgonon, Maine, had his publications burnt and died in prison when Peter was only 13.

Kate Bush in 1985, the year of Cloudbusting's release (REX)

But for the video, she was as much inspired by Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy Brazil, released six months before the video in the February of 1985. Although this was the age of the high-gloss video, of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Duran Duran’s Wild Boys, Bush aspired to make Cloudbusting look like a short film, and created the storyboard with Gilliam, borrowing the grey, Fifties palette from Brazil, and choosing his cameraman Julian Doyle to direct.

A huge fan of Don’t Look Now, she tracked down Donald Sutherland in a hotel in London and called on him personally to ask him appear. Without enough time to secure a work permit for him, he ended up doing the three-day shoot for free. The cloudbusting machine was created by the designers behind the Alien film, and only loosely based on Reich’s original design.

After the success of Cloudbusting, the singer’s ambition for her videos would grow, up until 1993’s The Line, The Cross and the Curve. The 50 minute film that she had made to accompany The Red Shoes album was panned by critics, damned by even Bush herself as “a load of b_______.”

Cloudbusting has stood the test of time for me, though, the perfect balance between visuals and song, where the narrative of the film distils the simple, universal emotion of the music. It is ultimately a song about grief for both the innocent joy of childhood and for the loss of a father, a magical mantra that I kept with me during the death of both my parents. Ultimately, Bush makes it a song of consolation; where rain becomes not sadness but a moment of hope and reconciliation, where “something good” might still happen again.

When I see Bush this August I’d be amazed if she emerged in dungarees with stuck on freckles wheeling four cardboard pipes on wheels. I imagine that she’ll still be pushing at the sky of her own imagination, still dreaming of her own Orgonon.